There is no such thing as a value-free concept of deviance; to say homosexuals are deviant because they are a statistical minority... is, in practice, to stigmatize them. Nuns are rarely classed as deviants for the same reason, although if they obey their vows they clearly differ very significantly from the great majority of people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday ...purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Predictions usually deal with events--who will win an election, whether or not a country will go to war, the specification of a ne...w invention; they center on decisions. Yet such predictions, while possible, cannot be formalized, i.e. made subject to rules. The prediction of events is inherently difficult. Events are the intersect of social vectors (interests, forces, pressures, and the like). While one can to some extent assess the strength of these vectors individually, one would need a "social physics" to predict the exact crosspoints where decisions and forces combine.... Forecasting is possible where there are regularities and recurrences of phenomena (these are rare), of where there are persisting trends whose direction, if not exact trajectory, can be plotted with statistical time-series or be formulated as historical tendencies. Necessarily, therefore, one deals with probabili ties and an array of possible projections. But the limitations of forecasting are also evident. The further one reaches ahead in time with a set of forecasts, the greater the margin for error, since the fan of the projections widens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perf...ectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and w...ait for a chance of using it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at... issue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Plato's was essentially a dualistic theory. To him, the divine ideas, the universals, the general qualities, the genera, were the ...only real beings, that, like the deities, had an absolute, independent existence. God himself was the supreme idea. The man, the animal, the beautiful, the good, the brave, and so on, represented realities, the archetypes of life of which the individuals, the earthly forms of those general qualities, as they appeared in daily life, were mere shadows and faint replicas.... Aristotle connected the two spheres by seeing the spiritual soul and the intrinsic idea as the formative principle of the body, and, at the same time, as an "entelechy," an innate, ideal goal of the individual that effects evolution. The individuals, then, participate in the essential reality of ideas. This participation becomes effective when man comprehends the ideas and their connections, when he gathers and abstracts the ideas from their multifold, individual manifestation, in short, when he thinks logically. This procedure implied the legitimacy of empirical observation, and of inductive conclusion from observed facts to abstract generalities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the two cities seem to stand in contrast to each another. Florence has become a bustling and vital modern city. Whilst it ma...y no longer nurture Michelangelos and Botticellis, there are native Florentine painters of international renown. Its ancient craft of leatherwork plays a distinctive role in contemporary fashion, and Florentines have effectively revived the old skills with stuffs and dyes and organized their distribution on a scale which dwarfs the network of the once ubiquitous Medici banks. Venice instead is apparently a city belonging only to her past, an empty shell of former glories. Its native population diminishes constantly, deserting the island for the industrial wasteland that threatens to destroy what is left of millennial grandeur. Its last remaining industry makes baubles for the tourists who come in droves to stay on a statistical average of eighteen hours, to mill about and to gawk at the remaining relics of the Seremissima's magnificence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambig...uity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »